Category: Photography

The mobile photo sharing space is hot right now, with services like Instagram, Picplz, and Pathgrowing like weeds. A new contender called Color is causing some buzz after successfully raising a whopping $41 million… before even launching. The company has seven notable founders who have either started successful companies in the past (e.g. Lala and BillShrink) or have held executive positions at them (LinkedIn). Among the investors is Sequoia Capital, one of the most influential and successful firms in Silicon Valley and the firm that funded Google. They gave Color more than they gave Google.

“Yekpare” is a storyteller which narrates the 8500 year story of Istanbul. The story embraces symbols from Pagans to Roman Empire, from Byzantine Empire to Latin Empire, and finally from Ottoman Empire to Istanbul at the present day.

Haydarpaşa Train Station, with its brilliant architectural forms, is the building on which the story is projected. The connection between middle east to west has been provided by Istanbul and Haydarpaşa since 1906. In the 50’s it served as a door for millions of internal emigrants who have triggered the chaos in Istanbul’s dialectical daily life scenes.The project’s conceptual, political and geographical positioning, the location’s depth of field and the fact that the entire show can be watched from Kadıköy coast; make “Yekpare” a dramatic presentation.

Vacation planning is one of the frequent—but nonetheless laborious—tasks that people engage themselves with online; requiring skilled interaction with a multitude of resources. This paper constructs intra-city travel itineraries automatically by tapping a latent source reflecting geo-temporal breadcrumbs left by millions of tourists. For example, the popular rich media sharing site, Flickr, allows photos to be stamped by the time of when they were taken and be mapped to Points Of Interests (POIs) by geographical (i.e. latitudelongitude) and semantic (e.g., tags) metadata.

Leveraging this information, we construct itineraries following a two-step approach. Given a city, we first extract photo streams of individual users. Each photo stream provides estimates on where the user was, how long he stayed at each place, and what was the transit time between places. In the second step, we aggregate all user photo streams into a POI graph. Itineraries are then automatically constructed from the graph based on the popularity of the POIs and subject to the user’s time and destination constraints.

although french artist georges rousse is a photographer, his work contains a lot of painting. his works are photographs of paintings done on buildings which are made to look like overlays of colour. from the single point perspective of rousse’s camera, his paintings are made to appear 2-dimensional. in reality you would see that the paintings are strategically done in 3 dimensions. this illusion is what makes rousse’s work so intriguing. his ‘durham’ project is currently the subject of the documentary ‘bending space’, a fitting tile to describe rousse’s work.

Korean sculptor Gwon Osang creates these outstanding 3D pieces from 300+ photographs of the original subjects, which are overlaid onto a lightweight life-size mannequins (see above). Osang, graduated from the Hong-ik University sculpture department, ever since hes been one of the most recognized contemporary artists in Korea for his non-conventional approach to sculpture.

Osang’s composites made up of photographs look almost like ceramics to the naked eye, although closer inspection reveals the technigue of grand illusion; there are elements of realism mixed with distortion that makes the audience see the reflections from the fuzzy lens. Gwon’s photo-sculptures require a meticulous and cumbersome procedure to create his quilted tapestry of human attributes. After many different sections of the model’s anatomy are shot with the same light source, the film is developed and the prints are pieced together to form a sculptural body. The fact that Gwon used this process to achieve a sculptural end-result is without precedent in the history of contemporary art. Though, recently, similarities of Gwon’s sculptures with artwork of German artist Oliver Herring have been made..

Idée Inc. extracted the colours from 10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using their visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by determining multiple colors as search parameters.

Such is the wonderful world of search results on google that in an inadvertent manner it helped me locate something that I was looking for and the name of which I had forgotten. When Murat posted tag galaxy I was immediately reminded of a stunning data visualization project on Flickr. But try as I might I could not remember what it was called. And then I woke up this morning to find that someone, somewhere in the world had conducted a search using the terms “flickr information visualization” and had found us. However number one on the search results was Time Graphs, which was the piece that I was looking for!

I think you can (and should) join and contribute to these pools, provided that you do not give out your blog addresses or too much information related to whatever it is you are posting. Of course, there are many many more pools that are of potential interest to you on Flickr, also many on graphic design and typography, as well as really cool photography groups. So, you really should conduct a good search amongst Flickr groups in the areas which are of interest to you. Here is some of what I found which may relate to our area of work: